Through a Glass, Darkly

Will You Miss Me When I Burn is a multi-media installation from the artist's ongoing series, Through a Glass, Darkly, featuring ash wall drawings and video of natural disasters projected against mirrors fabricated in kiln-cast glass. The below iterations of the sculpture were presented at the 21c Museum Hotel and Art Academy of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Through a Glass, Darkly is a body of work started in 2012 with video sculptures that use projection, sound and kiln cast glass. These installations began with an idea to create a memory seen through a "mirror" that has lost all of its naturally reflective qualities and becomes a portal. At this time, I was also researching historical optical tools, like the Calude Glass (or black mirror): an oval, sepia tinted mirror that some followers of the Hudson River School used to create a picturesque composition from which to sketch and paint. At this time I was also first beginning to work with kiln cast glass and to make objects that could be projected upon. The work became layered with ideas of perception, memory, and larger issues of the contemporary landscape, gender and environmental fragility.

Biography

Artist Alice Pixley Young’s recent projects have responded to issues of place and impermanence, using both the urban and natural environments as a framework. In her installations, other worlds are accessed through the portals of mirrors, using projected video and light. Wallpapers of ash, kiln-cast glass hand mirrors, and video of environmental disasters mark the poignancy of impermanence. Young mines the psychology of spaces and memory, juxtaposing video of current environmental events with past architectural elements.

Alice Pixley Young’s work has been supported through grants from the City of Cincinnati, the Surdna Foundation and the NEA. Her work has appeared in Sculpture Magazine and at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Bullseye Projects, the 21c Museum and Currents International New Media Festival. Young was awarded Best in Show for her installation at 1708 Gallery’s InLight exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has been awarded several residencies including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center and Jentel. Raised in Washington DC, she attended Ringling College of Art and Design and the New York Studio Residency Program, and received an MA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Maryland.